Djibouti:SEACOM second cable repair underway

SEACOM’s repair vessel has arrived at the second marine fault on its cable in the Red Sea.

The fault was identified while it was fixing a separate fault on the cable – off the coast of Djibouti – which caused an outage in April. The second fault is north of the first one.

The planned service-affecting repair was scheduled to take place from 19 to 22 May, and started yesterday as planned.

“Given that the nature of the fault issue is not known until the cable has been retrieved and inspected, SEACOM can only estimate repair timelines,” it said.

“We estimate the SEACOM subsea cable could be down for three days during this repair window.”

It said the impact of the repair process will affect all linear transmission traffic on the east coast of Africa to and from Europe.

“Customers with IP or other managed network services will remain unaffected, but could experience higher latencies as traffic will predominantly be routed over SEACOM’s transmission links on the west coast of Africa, as well as on SEACOM’s network to Asia gateways.”